Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/70280 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2012
Series/Report no.: 
EPRI Working Paper No. 2012-6
Publisher: 
The University of Western Ontario, Economic Policy Research Institute (EPRI), London (Ontario)
Abstract: 
[Eliminating history from economic thought] Formal analysis, in which maximizing agents use today's 'true' model of the economy to form expectation upon which they then base their behaviour, trivializes the role of the future in economic life and ignores the possibility that the past's models, which helped generate the data against which today's models are tested, differed from the latter. Such analysis denies that economics has a relevant history, and its current dominance explains the decline of the history of economic thought within the discipline. [Mark Blaug on the quantity theory: A skirmish on the border between science and politics in the history of economic thought] Mark Blaug brought his usual standards of historical awareness and respect for empirical content to bear when he wrote about the Quantity Theory of Money, but he hesitated to probe too deeply into the political and ideological elements of its history, perhaps leading him to underestimate their importance for the theory's evolution.
Subjects: 
time
progress
empirical evidence
true model
rational expectations
money
quantity theory
value theory
positive economics
empiricism
formalism
bimetallism
gold standard
monetarism
JEL: 
A10
B10
B1
B2
B31
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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